18 Years Ago Today

On July 3, 2004, in the first ever post on this blog, I wrote:

Following the example of my friends Bill Crider and Ed Gorman, I've decided to start a blog. I may not post every day, and what gets posted here may be pretty haphazard sometimes, but I intend to talk mostly about what I'm reading and sometimes writing, as well as the events in my life I don't deem too boring. (Whether the readers find it too boring is, of course, up to them.) Don't expect anything about politics or religion.

Well, Bill and Ed are gone, and I miss them and always will. The rest of that paragraph has aged fairly well, I think. I've posted haphazardly about reading and writing and the occasional bit of personal news, good and bad. Still nothing about politics or religion, and there won't be.

Later in that post, after some of that personal stuff, I wrote:

For those of you who don't know, I'm a professional writer and have been since 1976. Yesterday I finished my 165th novel, so I'm sort of between projects at the moment. I have to do some research and come up with a proposal for a historical novel, and then the next thing on the schedule is a house-name Western novel. I have work lined up through the spring of '05, which in the world of freelance fiction writing is considered pretty good job security. Of course, it could all come to a crashing halt after that.

Clearly, the writing career didn't come to a crashing halt, since I've more than doubled the number of novels I've written since then. And I still have work lined up, the only question being whether I can find the time and mental capability to do it. (I probably will, but these days I'm less sure than I used to be.)

I should have waited until the 20th anniversary of the blog to post this, but I'm learning not to take too many things for granted. When I started the thing, 'way back in 2004, I gave no thought to how long I'd keep doing it. I wouldn't have guessed that I'd still be at it 18 years later, though. I've had a wonderful time writing the blog, though. Every couple of weeks, I get overwhelmed and say, "That's it, something's gotta go, and it's going to have to be the blog." And then I start hunting for pulp covers to post, or read something I like and want to recommend, and somehow it keeps going. I hope it will for a while yet.

Thank you to all of you who have stuck with me. Blogs are prehistoric now, we all know that. But I've always felt a little more comfortable in the past, and I hope you enjoy visiting it with me.